Having noticed my pants fitting a bit too snugly, and having foolishly counted the number of times I ate at the combination Taco Bell/KFC in one week (around 4), I have recently been considering trying to get into shape. (My recent use of our new fryer to create fried Oreos and fried cinnamon buns has added to these concerns as well.) Part of that involves renouncing the siren song of the Beefy 5-layer Burrito and steering myself toward salads and junk like that, what one might call “healthy” food.

Or mightn’t one? Somepeopleinsistthat one mustn’t. Healthy, in these people’s world, means only possessing good health. Healthful is the only correct form for food and other objects that induce good health in others, they say.

And, as you might have supposed, they’re bonkers. Obviously, healthy and healthful are both valid in their respective meanings given above — good job on that front, at least — but there’s nothing wrong with using healthy to mean “promoting or inducing good health”. MWDEU says that the whole notion that something’s wrong with that usage can be traced back to 1881, when a fellow named Alfred Ayers declared it so in a book called The Verbalist. (Google Books has the 1909 edition online.) The trouble with Ayres’s declaration is that it spit in the face of at least 330 years of usage; the OED’s first citation for healthy, in 1552, defines the two words identically, and both meanings for healthy are attested all the way up to Ayres’s book’s publication. (Here’re a few examples, from 1744, 1793, and 1828.)

So unless you think Ayres knows something about English that no else does, you can safely ignore his broad-cloth assertion. It’s fine to use healthy to mean “promoting good health”, and the prescribed restriction is poppycock.

But there is a small seed of truth to Ayres’s belief: healthful has all but lost its ability to mean “possessing good health”. That’s weird, because healthful, following the commonest meaning of the -ful suffix, would be expected to mean “full of health”. But that meaning has been largely lost to healthy. “Healthy people” has 2,030,000 Google hits, “healthful people” only 4,960 — a 400:1 ratio. “Healthy food” has 3,590,000 Google hits, “healthful food” has 99,300 — a 36:1 ratio. In both cases, healthy is more common, but healthful is less overwhelmed in its “promoting health” meaning than in its “possessing health” meaning. I find this a nice counter-example to any claim that English suffixation is obligatorily logical.

And if you’ll excuse my ending on an aside, this is one of the weirdest pieces of advice I’ve ever heard: it’s wrong to use healthy as a literal adjective meaning “promoting health”, but it’s fine to use it to mean “metaphorically promoting health”. So (1a) would be wrong and (1b) would be fine.

(1a) I’m eating some healthy foods. [“BAD”]
(1b) I have a healthy fear of viruses. [“GOOD”]

That, my friends, is daft.

Summary: No matter what prescriptivists say, healthy can mean “possessing health”, as in healthy people, or “promoting health”, as in healthy food. Both meanings have been attested for 450 years, and the claim against the latter was an unjustified assertion from 1881 by a prescriptivist otherwise lost to the sands of history. Healthful can mean “promoting health” or “possessing health” as well, although the latter usage is nowadays rare.

About The Blog

A lot of people make claims about what "good English" is. Much of what they say is flim-flam, and this blog aims to set the record straight. Its goal is to explain the motivations behind the real grammar of English and to debunk ill-founded claims about what is grammatical and what isn't. Somehow, this was enough to garner a favorable mention in the Wall Street Journal.

About Me

I'm Gabe Doyle, currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford University. Before that, I got a doctorate in linguistics from UC San Diego and a bachelor's in math from Princeton.

In my research, I look at how humans manage one of their greatest learning achievements: the acquisition of language. I build computational models of how people can learn language with cognitively-general processes and as few presuppositions as possible. Currently, I'm working on models for acquiring phonology and other constraint-based aspects of cognition.

I also examine how we can use large electronic resources, such as Twitter, to learn about how we speak to each other. Some of my recent work uses Twitter to map dialect regions in the United States.

Another reason most people _say_ “healthy” instead of “healthful” is because the tongue stumbles from the second “h” over the “f” to the second “l.” Agree? If not, say “healthy” fast three times, and then try to say “healthful” fast thrice.

I’m pretty sure “healthful” isn’t much used in any context apart from by:
1) awful prescriptivists; and
2) people who want to sound as if they’re speaking some sort of jargon language — largely the same sort of people who sell “beverages” and “preserves”.

Alfred Ayres is not really “a prescriptivist lost to the sands of history”; as I said in Language Log a few years ago, he was “with Richard Grant White, one of the great grammar/usage ranters of the 19th century” — though with White, he tended to come out strongly on the losing side of usage questions. I hope to post soon on the subject.

Great post. I used to work at a food magazine where the copy editors insisted on the prescriptivist “healthful,” as in “healthful food.” I thought they were nuts, but they beat the sense out of me. When I went to another magazine and changed “healthy lifestyle” to “healthful” I was beat up again. But good sense won out.

I like the summary in Merriam-Webster’s Pocket Guide to English Usage: “if you observe the conventional distinction (which was introduced only in the 1880s), you are correct but in the minority; if you ignore it, you are correct and in the majority.”

Regarding the daftness of thinking example 1a is bad but 1b is good: I’ve always interpreted statements like 1b to be using healthy to mean metaphorically -possessing- health not metaphorically promoting health. As in, the fear of viruses is strong/vigorous.